Free Astra: Synchronicity by Lisa Eskra Page B

thing
she'd ever had to an imaginary friend. Nadine always wondered if
she was an angel because impossible situations were suddenly
manageable.
    "I'm looking for room twenty-seven," she
said. "The XO assigned me to quarters there and I can't seem to
find it."
    Nadine thrust a few bags into the woman's
arms and nodded down the hallway. Between the two of them, they
hobbled back to room twenty-seven without any assistance from the
security guard. When they arrived outside it, the woman finally
realized they would be rooming together, and they shared a warm
smile.
    They dropped the bags in the center of the
room, and once the guard shut the door, Nadine hugged the woman.
Relief eclipsed her sadness and replaced it with joy. The figment
of her visions turned out to be a flesh-and-blood person, and she
could not contain the bliss that revelation brought to her.
    Today, fate reaffirmed its presence as the
guiding force in her life. Her telepathic prowess made her a Tier-7
psion, but she also possessed the ability of a Seer. For the past
year her visions had abandoned her, being either too cryptic or too
vague to decipher. This woman restored her faith in her abilities,
and she didn't even know her name.
    The lady pulled back and offered her a smile.
"Do you know me?"
    Nadine shook her head. "I don't believe we've
ever met, no."
    "My name is Amii. I'm sorry that guard was
such a jerk to you."
    She found the lack of negativity in Amii
refreshing. "Nobody's made it easy for me. You'd think I'd come to
expect that by now. But it never gets any easier."
    "Why would you expect people to be rude? Who
are you?"
    The comment left her a bit perplexed since
most people recognized her on sight. "Nadine Taylor? Wife of Bryan
Taylor, the Vice President of Chara?" When Amii shook her head, she
bluntly stated, "The psion?"
    "I had an accident and lost my memory. I came
aboard with Xander Adams on Pisa." Amii took a seat at the table
while the second lady began to unpack some of her dresses.
    Nadine watched Amii curiously. She had a
difficult time sensing the woman's mind. To reassure her it wasn't
a dream, she reached out and touched Amii's shoulder, which
registered as solid. It may have had something to do with her
memory loss; perhaps her mind was too scrambled right now to
decipher.
    "Tell me your favorite color," she said at
random as she folded a sweater.
    Amii glanced around the room, appearing a bit
uncertain of the answer herself. "Green? I like green."
    "I'm thinking red, actually. It's absolutely
the right color for you. You can tell a lot about a person by what
their favorite color is. People who like blue are more sincere and
easy-going. People who like yellow are funny yet cautious."
    "What about people who like red?"
    "People who like red tend to be intelligent
and lose their memory at the worst possible times," she mused. "But
they're also friendly and reserved. You seem that way to me. Tell
me Amii: do you believe in fate?"
    "In the sense that the future is predestined?
No. I refuse to believe that the choices I make today were not
really choices at all. It feels better than resigning to the fact
nothing matters because time is already programmed to unfold a
given way."
    Nadine sat down beside her. "That's the way I
thought for a long time. My Seer skills took a lot longer to reach
their potential than my telepathic ones. Everything I've glimpsed
has come to pass. I've grown to realize that time is fluid and
decisions do matter, but in the end most don't. Were the choices
that did matter ever destined to unfold differently? I can't say.
But I do know they don't."
    "How much can you see? Do you know what's
going to happen tomorrow? Do you know when you're going to
die?"
    "No. And thankfully no." She took a deep
breath, trying to find words to describe the transcendent
experience peering into the future was. "I'm not a true Seer. I get
visions about major events in the near future. I don't typically
know things more than a few months